A home appliance stores setting values for performing a predetermined operation, information generated during the operation or failure information, and in particular, outputs a predetermined alarm when a failure occurs, so that a user using the home appliance may be recognize the state of the home appliance. Such home appliance does not only indicate the completeness of an operation or occurrence of a failure but also outputs specific failure information through an output means provided therein, such as, e.g., a displaying means or lamp.
Meanwhile, in case an error occurs in the home appliance, a user contacts a service center to ask for some advice or request them to send a service person to fix the home appliance.
At this time, failure information is output from the home appliance in a simple way or as code values that are not understood by the user, and thus, it is difficult for the user to respond to the failure. Accordingly, even when the home appliance may be connected to the service center, the state of the home appliance, in many cases, is difficult to exactly let them know. Thus, a service person who visits the user's home fails to precisely figure out the state of the home appliance in advance, thus leading to an increase in time and costs for fixing the home appliance. For example, unless parts necessary to repair the home appliance are previously prepared, a service person needs to revisit the user's home and consumes time as much.
To address such problems, the home appliance may be connected to a server of the service enter through a predetermined communication means, and this requires establishment of a communication network.
Further, development in technology enables remote diagnosis on failure information using a telephone network.
Patent application No. EP0510519 discloses a technology of transferring failure information from a home appliance to a service center through a telephone network and a model connected to the home appliance. However, the problem is that the model needs to remain connected to the model. In particular, home appliances, such as washing machines, which are generally installed outdoor, are limited by place when being connected to a telephone network.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,987,105 discloses a technology of transforming failure information of a home appliance into a sound with an audible frequency and transmitting it to a service center through a telephone and a telephone network. While the failure information of the home appliance is transformed into the audible-frequency sound and is then transferred to the phone receiver, signal interference may occur due to surrounding environments, or during the course of transmission of the sound through the telephone network, data loss may happen according to characteristics of the telephone network.
In the above-described U.S. Pat. No. 5,987,105 patent, the size of one symbol, which represents one bit as one information unit, is set as 30 ms and an independent frequency is used for each bit in order to prevent data loss and exact product transfer.
However, the conventional systems fail to suggest specific schemes on how to perform diagnosis on the state of the home appliance by receiving a sound. There is a need for offering specific ways on performing failure diagnosis using data included in product information in addition to outputting the product information using a sound.
Further, the conventional systems can diagnose only error codes, but does not provide any solutions when the home appliance itself does not have problems but the operation of the home appliance is affected by surrounding facilities or environments or no errors are found but a user reports inconvenience or failures.
Even for the problems that may be solved by the user's simple manipulation, a service person is sometimes dispatched. Accordingly, a need exists for a scheme to be able to respond to users' complaints.